NTLDR is missing error

Just when I thought the worst of my PC problems has passed, I recently had to deal with this "NTLDR is missing" error. This stands for New Techology Loader. What the problem is it is unable to find the master boot record to figure out which partition has the operating system. Apparently a very common error though I've never faced it in my life.

I was also in a predicament since I was in Hong Kong at that time and had none of my recovery disk CDs (why on earth would I bring them anyways?). With another laptop on hand to help me (thank goodness) So I did some searching on the internet and found a helpful site:

Windows Vista Recovery Disc Download

I could download just the recovery portion of the Vista Operating system disk and use that recovery portion. I went ahead with this, and then followed this tutorial to fix the problem.

Only problem was when I got to the part where it says:

bootrec.exe /fixmbr
x:\boot\bootsect.exe /nt60 all /force

The second command using bootsect.exe is NOT found on the recovery disk!!! I don't understand why they would tell us to use a command on the disk and not have the command in the ISO. I then tried to do some troubleshooting and download the bootsect.exe file itself, and then attempted to modify the ISO image to add this bootsect.exe. Tutorial on how to do this can be found here. To no avail, I ended up corrupting the ISO and never getting it to work. In the end, all the solutions the tutorial provided failed.

What happened in the end was I just waited until I got back to Canada. Then I called Dell to explain the situation. After some lengthly and pointless troubleshooting questions and steps, I just ended up reinstalling the whole operating system again.

UGHHH!!! I am starting to hate Dell and PCs. The case of getting a MAC as my next laptop is growing stronger.

Setting up my Dell Inspiron 1420

Update Nov 28th: So finally done the whole works of reformating my laptop and installing all the drivers. I then proceeded to do all the recommended updates for my windows OS. After that was done, my sister rebooted and then I got this constant BLUESCREEN OF DEATH. Like I couldn't get back into windows. One of the stupid windows updates was causing my laptop to fail to boot. UGH!!!!! I hate computers!!! Anyways to solve this, I turned off automatic download and install of window updates, and chose to select which updates to install. So far I've chosen all the important ones aside from the odd windows mail security updates which I didn't bother because I don't use windows mail. I am not sure exactly what is causing this bluescreen of death. But I am installing the updates in separate groups so if one group fails, then the OS can be restored to the last system restore point which can be done by popping in the OS cd and choosing "repair system"

This latest experience with PCs has actually got me contemplating whether I should be getting a "crapintosh." I hate them...but I can't stand this downtime. It's killing me. I have so much work to do.

Getting my replacement hard drive for my Dell has been a complete pain the butt, but I finally got it done. Now the next ignoring part is to reinstall all the drivers/programs. For the first time, I decided to call Dell to get the "correct" way to install everything. So here is a documentation of the steps that I took:

Assuming that the hard drive has been wiped clean of data and we are starting a completely new install of the OS

• Pop in the Dell Media Direct CD and let the computer boot from it. When prompt on the selection, choose the 1st option which is to partition everything to the C: drive and then let it do this. This will create a partition D: which has about 3 GB for the Dell Media Direct which allows you to play movies and DVDs. (Don't really have to do this, but apparently if I don't I won't be able to play DVDs unless I find a decoder.


• After the Dell Media Direct has been installed, pop in the OS and let the system boot from that CD. Follow the instructions until you reach the partition screen. You should see two partitions. One with the Media Direct, and another containing everything else. You delete the one partition that is NOT media direct. You can then choose to re-setup a partition and extend from it. And then choose to have the OS installed at one of the new partitions.
  
  

  The technician told me to delete and then re-setup a partition. I have no idea why we have to do this, but I just followed his advice.



• After the OS is installed, then let the system boot up and pop in the drivers CD.
  Now install these drivers in this order:
  
  

  Always choose to restart later unless specified.

  
  
  
  
  1. Notebook system (under Utilities)
  
  
  2. Intel Chipset Driver
  
  
  3. Rioch
  
  
  4. Video (should be at the bottom)
  
  
  5. Restart the computer now
  
  
  6. Audio
  
  
  7. Webcam
  
  
  8. Touchpad
  
  
  9. Broadcom (Network)
  
  
  10. Dell wireless - except in US, Japan (Network)
  
  
  11. Quickset
  
  
  12. Dell wireless bluetooh
  
  
  
  


• After all these drivers have been installed, restart the system again.


• After the system has been rebooted, put into the media direct CD and then follow the instructions to let it install. It will take awhile depending on the size of te hard drive. But once you are done installing that, your system is ready to go!

"A 5400 RPM hard drive is no different from a 7200 RPM hard drive"

Update Nov 27th: So I called in to ask for exact instructions on how to properly install all the drivers on my computer. Usually I do this myself, but I want to see if there was some faster automatic way to install the drivers. Upon installing the OS, I told them I wanted to setup to partitions, and the technician told me that DELL doesn't support this. WOW...what a bunch of crap!

Update Nov 27th: Today I finally got my 7200 RPM hard drive from Dell and I guess they really did run out of parts. Because the hard drive they sent me has a capacity of 300GB which is 160GB more than my old hard drive. About time something went my way!!!

This was what the Dell hardware department manager told me tonight. All I can say is...wow. This past week I've been dealing with Dell's utter bullcrap. My laptop hard drive mysterious died on me out of no where last week. No warning whatsoever. Just died on me. I was pretty devastated, but I figured with Dell's spectacular customer service and support I would resolve this problem with breeze.

So I called them Tuesday night and proceeded to wait a good 15-20 minutes. And finally I got to speak to a representative and proceeded to give them my laptop's service tag. Here was the response I got:

Sorry sir. But your service tag is not showing up on our systems. It appears that you haven't purchased a laptop from us.

I was like WTF? What do you mean I haven't bought a laptop from you? I am looking at a receipt that says I spent nearly two grand for this Dell laptop and you are telling me I didn't buy it from you? The representative told me I had to talk to the customer service department to fix this. Unfortunately, they were open only from 8 am to 8 pm. So I was basically out of luck tonight.

Frustrated I had to basically wait until tomorrow morning to get any help. So the following morning, I called in and explain my situation. Turns out because my original laptop had a problem and I had to get an exchange, the exchanged laptop's service tag never got registered with my account and thus it wasn't showing up. They explain to me that this would be fix within 24 hours. 48 hours at most. And they said they would call me back as soon as this has been fixed. 48 hours no call back. So I called back to get an update. And this time I wait over an hour to get any reasonable help. I got transferred from one department to another department and finally ended up in the customer service department who simply told me that I had to wait longer for the service tag to be registered.

GRRR! This was starting to piss me off. It's been over 3 days and I still haven't started to fix my laptop hard drive problem yet. I am still working on getting them to recognize the fact that I bought a laptop from them. The worst part was that the weekend was coming and the customer service department is closed on the weekends. So basically, I had to get this service tag issue solved today or else I would get no support till monday. So I ended up calling on Saturday and this time the service tag got registered. Yeah!

And after some chatting and testing, they acknowledge that the hard drive has indeed died and they would send me a new hard drive. I give them my shipping address and then proceed to wait for the new hard drive. When my new hard drive arrives I am pretty excited and pop it in and start doing all the drive installation and application installing.

However, there was one big problem. I noticed the system's installation was slower than pre-hard drive failure. I only noticed this because I use my laptop everyday with lots of computer intensive stuff. So I look into the model number of my hard drive and it turns out that the hard drive actually has a lower RPM. It is only 5400 RPM while the original one I had ordered was 7200 RPM!!! Ridiculous!!!

So I called Dell again and complained to them the situation and they tried to basically talk me out of it by saying that there was no difference between a 5400 and 7200 RPM hard drive. It all depends on the processor and memory of the laptop to make a difference. Well HELLO!?!?! My processor and memory is making a difference!! And even if it made no difference, I feel ripped off Dell. Because basically I paid more for this 7200 RPM and they are telling me it is the same now??!?! After some more arguing and scolding of Dell, they finally decided to send me a new hard drive with the 7200 RPM. Something they should have done in the beginning. And I told them that I found it absurd that they could even suggest to customers that there was no difference and hence that is why they sent me a lower quality hard drive.

After mentioning and scolding them on this issue, the technician looked into the issue and told me that the reason I got a 5400 RPM hard drive was because they ran out of 7200 RPM hard drives. What a bunch of crap!! You run of out of the equipment so you start sending lower quality equipment to make up for it? That's pathetic. Stupid Dell. Has really made me think twice about buying a computer from them again.

Update on Dell Laptop External Sleep Problem

So I did some more testing, and I found out my theory about the laptop going into "unfriendly sleep mode" only happens the second time was false. I can't produce a reliable pattern, it just seems to sometimes go into a sleep mode, and then sometimes the display just turns off yet everything is still functionally.

I spent almost 3 hours on the phone with Dell technical support in hopes they could help me. Trying to explain to them the phenomenon of the laptop going into this mysterious "sleep" mode and avoiding it when music is playing was longest part. Over and over again I had to explain to them my situation. In any case, nothing worked. The technician even tried to flash my BIOS, and the scariest part was I was supposed to wait for my laptop to shut down and this would flash it...but it never shut down. When I told the technician I think he was worried out of his mind that he was screwed up my laptop. Flashing your bios is something dangerous and can really screw things up. So I had to manually turn my laptop off...for like the 500th time. And it booted up fine (whew), but when I tried to shut down it THEN tried to flash my bios only it failed with this message about how it couldn't update because it couldn't find the ROM file???

God...the technician then said he would go to bring this to Microsoft because it was clearly a Vista operating system problem. I don't know what is going on anymore. All I fricking want is for my laptop to go into this nice like energy saving mode when I don't use it for awhile. Back in the XP days, I think my laptop always went into this standby mode which was nice and all I had to do was press the power button once and everything came back. But after reading this article
it appears that Microsoft has replaced this with their new feature "sleep" (the same bloody feature I am pulling my hair out about).

Apparently sleep is a combination of standby and hibernate. The computer will go into standby for the first while, and then after awhile it goes into hibernate. Sounds good. Except it DOESN'T WORK.

I hate computers!!!

Dell laptop in eternal sleep

For those who don't know, I just got a new totally wicked Dell Laptop Inspiron 1420. It's totally awesome because it has a Intel Duo Core 2 with 2.2 ghz, 4mb cache, and 800 FSB. And coupled with 4GB of ram. This is one beast. Yeah I am nerd...shut up.

Anyways, I ran into this seriously most frustrating bug or maybe it's a technical hardware problem. Who knows, but the problem is my Dell laptop will go into Sleep mode, no surprise there, after awhile of inactivity. The thing is once it enters "sleep" mode I can't bring the laptop display back! I should make a note that this sleep mode really isn't sleep mode...allow me to explain.

To get an idea of what was exactly going on (I am using Windows Vista by the way, which really isn't that bad...I guess all the talk about how it really sucked got me all scared, but to honest, I kinda like it), I went to the power management options and set my laptop to go into sleep mode after 1 minute. So waited one minute, and the laptop went into sleep mode. And when I say sleep mode what actually happened:

1. The display went black


2. The front 5 lights all turned off


3. The only light doing anything was the power light which was blinking

This should technically be the sleep mode. And so, I just pressed the power button and volia the laptop display came back and all the lights (well just the ones needed become solid again) and everything was fine and dandy.

So I am crazy right? What am I talking about? Now I waited one more minute so the laptop would go into sleep mode and I could really convince myself I was going crazy. Except this time after one minute, the display disappeared, but the lights remained solid. No power light blinking...nothing just like it was normally operating..only the display was black...Okay....?? Pressed power nothing...press the enter button nothing...press the media control buttons (ie. play, stop, etc) and the lights came on, and then disappeared. So it appeared my laptop was still running just the display is not visible. So I called Dell technical support hoping I could get some answers and after some lengthly describing of the problem, the guy suggested that run music and let the computer go into sleep mode. This will confirm that the problem is not the computer going into sleep mode, but rather the display or video card driver has a bug or whatever.

So I restarted my computer (doing the manual hold power button down for 10 secs...not good for the computer) and yeah yeah, got back into windows vista. And then I opened itunes and started playing a song and waited...and waited...and waiting...the laptop wasn't going into sleep mode!!! So I stopped the music and then waited 1 minute and sure enough, the laptop went into sleep mode! This was so weird...so according to this...the laptop will not going into sleep mode if music is playing on your lapotop??? But this was the actually friendly sleep mode. So I was able to turn it back on and then I waited another minute and the laptop went into the "unfriendly sleep mode." The funny thing was I left my mouse cursor on the play button of itunes before it actually went into the "unfriendly sleep mode" and so even though the display was gone, when I left-clicked (note: I didn't move my mouse after the display disappeared) the music started again! And I could stop and start it anything. So this proved that the laptop was still running only that the display was gone. So to summarize this:

1. Appears that the dell laptop goes into "friendly sleep mode" the first time and you can get out of the it by pressing the power button once


2. The second time, however, results in an "unfriendly sleep mode" which there is no way to get out of. In fact, I wouldn't even call it sleep mode. It's more like display just goes away, everything still works, but you can't get the display to come back. Not really a sleep mode.


3. Having music running will cause the laptop to NOT go into sleep mode. I found this to be most interesting of them all.

So how I do I solve this? The honest answer, I HAVE NO IDEA. I am still waiting for the Dell support guy to call me back and help me. But he suggested that we should try upgraded our video card driver (which I already think is upgraded, but we'll see what happens). And as a last resort, I can just set the power settings to NEVER go into sleep mode which would solve everything. But this would pretty stupid, and not to mention energy sucker. Come on, I am want to be environmental...

Crap like this makes me hate computers.